Sun Enlists in Free Software Foundation
Charles Babcock, InformationWeek
Sun Microsystems, which has viewed open source code alternatively as
a competitor and as a friend, announced today that it is joining the
Free Software Foundation, origin of the freely downloadable tools that
helped spawn the open source era. Simon Phipps, chief open source
officer, announced Sun would become a patron supporter of FSF during a
Saturday 24 Feb. keynote at the Free and open Source Software
Developers European Meeting in Brussels. FSF patrons make a financial
contribution to the foundation in exchange for the right to use its
logo on the Sun Web site. Patrons also get free consulting on the FSF's
General Public License. Sun recently announced that Java would become
GPL-licensed open source code. With Sun turning to the GPL, in addition
to its own Common Development and Distribution License, "it seemed
obvious that the connections should become stronger," Phipps said in
his blog on the move. The CDDL license option allows Java users to
produce and sell a product that includes proprietary code without being
obligated to disclose the source code for the proprietary parts. In
becoming an FSF patron, Sun joins the likes the Intel, IBM, HP, Google,
MySQL, EMC and JBoss. Sun and Oracle declined to support Linux-oriented
open source consortiums, such as the Open Source Development Labs. As
OSDL merged with the Free Standards Group to become The Linux
Foundation, Oracle became a corporate sponsor of the new group. Sun
still steers clear of Linux-oriented organizations.